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With more than 4,000 acres of surface parking lots in Long Island’s downtowns, the chance to re-imagine parking will hopefully encourage residents to contribute to the process. The Design Challenge seeks to stimulate innovative thinking about the area’s mass transit-served downtowns. The Long Island Index’s online journal of suburban design, Build a Better Burb, will be the principal site for public discussion about the designs.

Each of the winning architectural teams will receive design stipends and will have six weeks to complete their designs, which will be revealed in January by the Long Island Index. The firms and their corresponding communities are:

dub studios, Patchogue

LTL Architects, Westbury

Roger Sherman Architecture + Urban Design, Ronkonkoma

Utile, Inc., Rockville Centre

Nancy Rauch Douzinas, President of the Rauch Foundation, said in a statement that the search “produced some of the most creative firms in the nation for this challenge. We hope that the designs that emerge will both project the transformative potential of the specific sites in these communities and inspire a broader discussion on Long Island of the inventively positive presence that parking facilities could provide.”